alt Hacker NewsAs you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores.
It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.
It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)
It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)
It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.
A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).
Domain name? $15/year. Business email, $10/year.
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You think that's bad? You should see what the hole in the wall food place pays for rent every single month. They still don't require a subscription for their service.
None of that applies to Android, and it only applies to Apple because we have such abysmal regulation in the modern era, where you apparently aren't allowed to regulate business that happens with a computer for some reason.
Yep. Businesses have overhead.
There are plenty of businesses that have all that overhead and still sell things instead of subscriptions.
Flip this argument around: you go buy a rake at the hardware store. They tell you they need to charge $5 a month for as long as you want to use it since they have to pay for a phone and website, no apple fee, but their city business license is more than that, etc.
Precisely no one will take that deal. If the store wants to stay in business they must continue to sell more products. It’s not my responsibility to keep paying them for a product so they can have a phone line.
If you are selling an app that has a service backing it or are providing support and updates, fine. Try to sell it as a subscription. If you are selling an app that runs entirely on my device? Version it. If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development, create a new version that has something I would want to pay for.